A fairly direct and open attack on the standards of British food. Depressing but invigorating; a constant emphasis that as a nation we've screwed up royally and we're stuck in a self-perpetuating vicious cycle of eating trash.

Bratman demolishes the myth of widespread quality cooking in Britain, and studies the way that instant processed food has successfully established itself throughout the population to the point that anything else is virtually a class marker. The psychological, physiological and social problems this leads to are all flagged up, often compared directly to the rest of Europe.

The flip-side of this dysfunctional relationship with food is seeing it as something necessary rather than enjoyable, which encourages a vast disconnection with the source of food, an upswing in faddish eating, panicking about scares and a general mistrust of the content of what we eat. (At this point, she mentioned the charmingly surreal term "orthorexia", which delighted me) Basically, we just don't tend to enjoy food in the grand scheme of things, and this is at the root of the whole problem.

A polemic, and unabashedly so, but an effective one. Perhaps it could have been a bit shorter - it did get a bit repetitive - but it's a quick read so that's less of a problem.

Following on from the glittering tour de force that was ‘Shopped’, this is a wider attack on the food industry, not only on supermarkets but on the food companies, the government, schools and families that have turned British food into the homogenized, fatty, effort-free laughing stock that it is today.

Blythman skilfully compares our current food culture not only with contemporary European trends and American junk food, but also with our own history – we may have been less fat, and have cooked more and passed on vital culinary knowledge but, she argues, even fifty years ago we were favouring fatty traditional food and packet mixes over healthier meals cooked from scratch. The comparison of our eating habits and values with those of our European neighbours is devastating, particularly relating to family values around mealtimes and healthy eating, and the way school meals are approached here compared to France, for example.

Though the book doesn’t try to beat the reader over the head and inspire them to turn their entire lifestyle around the way ‘Shopped’ does, it is still very relevant, thought-provoking, and extremely accessible. Perhaps despite our lack of a real British food culture, Blythman can offer some inspiration to us to try to eat fresher food, cook simple, wholesome dishes, and enjoy our meals instead of accepting our Bad Food and letting the decline continue! ( )